This is the BBC.

This download is the only extract the BBC has of the sedition of desert island discs.

The programme was originally broadcast in 1963 and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

My doctor stamp as well as your university career and your writing and travelling.

You've held a number of important administrative fest.

For example, you were director of the World Land Usage Society.

The World Land Usage Survey, yes, that is so.

And our object there is to record, particularly on maps, the present use of the land according to a common system in the countries all over the world.

Yes, you produced a number of books on the subject.

Oh, yes, yes.

Do we use land reasonably sensibly or not?

Well, we've got this great problem all over the world that the population is increasing very rapidly indeed.

And so we've got a pressure on land resources.

And one country after another is being forced to carry out a survey of resources with the idea of making their own land produce more and more efficiently than it present.

With more intensive cultivation, isn't there a chance that the use of chemicals in fertilizers and so forth are going to reduce the value of food and indeed that ultimately we risk pointing the land?

Of course, you're asking me to give a lecture which I want at least an hour.

But I know what you're thinking of, that's this present problem about the use of chemicals fertilizers.

Yes.

Now we've got two things.

There is, with careless use, the very great danger of poisonous chemicals destroying natural vegetation, destroying our wildlife.

But we've got to remember at the same time that there's this question of freeing the world from hunger.

And if those same chemicals are properly used, that gives us a solution to the problem at the moment whereby we may say half the world goes to bed hungry.

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